Chad Miller is a Senior Manager of Database Administration at Raymond James Financial. Chad has worked with Microsoft SQL Server since 1999 and has been automating administration tasks using Windows Powershell since 2007. Chad is the Project Coordinator/Developer of the Powershell-based Codeplex project SQL Server PowerShell Extensions (SQLPSX). Chad leads the Tampa Powershell User Group and is a frequent speaker at users groups, SQL Saturdays and Code Camps.

I saw this question in one of forums on backing up i.e. scripting out a database object. The problem is easy to solve, but only if you’re familiar with SMO :). Even so, there some more obscure aspects of SMO like URNs which not many people are aware of. If you read the MSDN docs on SMO you’ll find URNs are referenced in a few places. I haven’t used them much, but for this case it makes sense. Normally if you want to get to an object in SMO you’d reference the server, then the database then the object type collection (StoredProcedures, Views, etc.), and then the object; however if you don’t know the object type you can call EnumObject method on the database to get a list of objects with its URN. The URN is like a primary key of objects in SMO. So, here’s my solution with with comments…